Media Technology Ventures

Specialty: Start-up companies whose products meld entertainment and information technologies

Capital Under Management: $65 million

Amount Invested in 1996: $2 million

Geography aside, Hollywood and Silicon Valley are moving closer together.

That’s the idea behind Media Technology Ventures, a Los Angeles firm that invests in companies whose products meld technology from both places.

Its investments include the Net Channel Inc., whose technology plugs the Internet into television, and Protozoa, which makes software to produce real time, 3-D animation.

“There is an information revolution underway driven by the convergence of related technologies,” said general partner Jonathan Funk, who helped start the fund last year after 15 years in the venture capital business in Southern California. Its investors include industry leaders such as Motorola, Sun Microsystems and Hearst.

Media Technology has focused on four areas of investment development: faster and cheaper computing technology; high-bandwidth communications for fast information delivery; on-line information; and the integration of television, telephone and personal computer.

In order to get a look at leading edge technology, the fund has teamed up with the University of Southern California’s four media centers, including EC2, a center for multimedia and electronic communications. The school holds a profit-sharing economic interest in the fund, Funk said.

“USC is a core of activity for new technology,” Funk said. “If one of the students or professors is working on something interesting, it might end up as an investment.”

For example, the 25 young companies in the EC2 program, a testbed and “incubator” for start-up multimedia firms, is of particular interest, he said.

The fund has three general partners, including Funk and Robert Ackerman, Jr., former president of The Ackerman Group, a merger and acquisitions/corporate partnering firm serving the venture capital industry. The third partner is the Silicon Valley-based AVI Capital, a venture capital partnership.

AVI Capital specializes in seed and early stage investment in computer and information technology. It has invested about $200 million “more traditional, non-multimedia” companies such as Apple Computer, Microchip and Cypress Semiconductor.

Wade Daniels